The June 1962 Alcatraz Escape

On the night of June 11, 1962, three of America's most determined prisoners quietly vanished from what was supposed to be an inescapable prison. Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin crawled through narrow ventilation ducts in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, climbed to the roof, and descended to the cold waters of San Francisco Bay — becoming the only people to escape the Rock and never be definitively found.

At approximately 9:30 p.m., after guards completed their evening count, the three men set their plan into motion. Morris was the architect — a career bank robber who had been transferred to Alcatraz after failed escape attempts at other facilities. The Anglin brothers, also bank robbers, had been housed in Cell Block B alongside Morris, and over months of careful, quiet conversation, a plan had taken shape.

That plan had been eighteen months in the making. Working in near-silence after lights-out, the men used improvised tools — including a drill fashioned from a stolen electric motor — to bore through the concrete walls of their cells and widen the ventilation grates at the rear of each cell. Every morning, they concealed their work with a paste of soap and paint, leaving the walls looking intact. Meanwhile, they quietly accumulated an escape kit: roughly fifty raincoat linings sewn together into a makeshift raft, wooden paddles, and life vests stuffed with kapok cotton. Their most audacious prop was a set of dummy heads — sculpted from papier-mâché, stuffed with hair collected from the prison barbershop — left propped in their bunks to fool guards during the night counts.